


Family Interviews

by tehchi



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bullying, Daredevil Spoilers, Gen, Now rated T for language, Swearing, mini!Daredevil
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-05 18:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4189905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehchi/pseuds/tehchi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In response to the following prompt:</p><p>"Matt/Happiness - AU - Matt gets Adopted as a Kid</p><p>Exactly what it says. Matt gets adopted by a loving family who help him deal with/heal from all the recent emotional trauma in his young life. I'd prefer this be after Stick leaves, so Matt does get a handle on his super-senses. So Matt would be around 11? 12?</p><p>Who adopts him? I dunno. For ultimate happiness AU, perhaps it's Foggy's family somehow (maybe in this AU they're not as poor as the show implies), so the two of them grow up together. Maybe it's an unrelated family but Matt and Foggy meet at school. Maybe Matt actually makes OTHER FRIENDS growing up in a more supportive environment. Maybe he has awesome adopted siblings. </p><p>I'd be especially interested to see how/if Matt gets into crimefighting in this AU. I feel like he'd still feel the pull to use his abilities somehow. But less fueled by all his bitter emotional baggage."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginnings

There was something in it for them. It had to be true, there was no getting around it. Any family adopting a kid like him (the term “special needs” applied to a wide swath of children in the foster system, not just learning disabilities but all kinds of what the system referred to as “barriers to adoption”) had to have some kind of agenda. He couldn’t shake the feeling that his new foster parents had been looking for him, specifically, and while during the first visit he chalked this up to hopeful imagination, he was now working under the disturbing possibility that maybe they were just looking for a disabled kid. (Since his mentor’s departure, Matt was in favor of calling a spade a spade wherever possible, and he refused to pretend he was normal, abled and happy when he wasn’t.)

That didn’t make any sense, of course, because neither of them acted weird around him, and in fact they didn’t do any of the things that Matt found particularly annoying, like taking him by the shoulders to steer him around things, or putting things in his hands instead of letting him find them himself. Matt had come to recognize that little-kid tone of voice that people used around him when they thought he was stupid as well as blind, an infuriating annoyance that ranked right up there with strangers shouting at him as if he was deaf. They didn’t use that tone, or raise their voices, and neither had touched him without his permission. 

The fact that he had no evidence to support his theory only made him more sure that it was true as the process wore on and it looked more and more like this family was actually going to stick (ha ha) with him. He hadn’t bothered to really take them in on their first visit, but when they came again, both of them together, Matt let his stupid hopes get the best of him, and extended both effort and senses to better take their measure as he came into the conference room (a square box and cheap table, full of proliferating echoes against drywall in a counterpoint of tiny, denser pings that outlined the arms of the cross on the wall). He heard and felt both of them turn to look at him as he found a chair in the first questing tap of his cane. 

The man was not tall, yet he had a very long stride that was evident even when he sat. His feet were always a little more widely set than most people, in a stance that Matt didn’t recognize but perceived from the sound of his shoes on the carpet to be stable in a strangely martial way. His voice was average American, straight out of the center of the country, and he wasn’t in a hurry to get his vowels out. To Matt’s seasoned New Yorker’s ear, he sometimes sounded a little confused when he talked, like he was mumbling. His name was Clint. The name made Matthew think of chewing gum, sharp edges and presidents. “Hey Matthew.” Matthew heard the smile—not because he was paying attention to the wet creak of face muscles in skin or moving air over lips (both of which he could hear should he concentrate), but because Clint was the kind of guy that smiled with his voice. 

Matthew didn’t smile back, or return the greeting. He didn’t want to make it seem like he was too anxious to be loved by either of these people. He wasn’t a lost puppy, and he reminded himself of it, hunching deeper down in the chair. 

The woman picked up on the silence and chimed in. “Hello, Matthew.” Matt had an easier time being in a room with Clint than he did Laura. She was so warm, so motherly, that he had difficulty trusting that she was real, and he couldn’t be mean to her the way he wanted to. “Hi,” he said, grudgingly, sliding down into the high-backed chair closest to the door and leaning his cane within reach. Like he had plenty of other places to be. 

Neither Clint nor Laura were from New York. She had a kinder, steadier voice than her husband, and she moved more often than he did, seated or standing. While Matt had the impression that Clint was continuously staring at him (an impression that didn’t bother him because he couldn’t see it, but that he noticed given the man’s lack of movement even in a small room), Laura was always shifting, smiling as she said things, leaning forward when she asked him questions, and rocking consistently to the same side, her left, whenever she laughed. She teased her husband (about weird things, like a dripping faucet he wouldn’t fix and some work uniform Matt hadn’t encountered yet), and he responded with more audible smiles. 

Both of them seemed to recognize his guarded aggression, and to his annoyance, neither seemed to take it seriously. Laura started talking about the place they had found in Brooklyn, which must have put a look on Matthew’s face because when she asked “What?” he had to say that he had never known anybody who lived in Brooklyn. He decided to ask an irritating question to see if he could rile either of them into anger, and went with the “Are you rich?” one. 

“Comfortable,” Clint said, grinning at his wife (or so Matt supposed, judging from the sound of his head turning and the amusement in his voice). Matthew turned his face toward him and frowned in concentration. Clint had a voice in the same range that Matt’s father’s had been, though it didn’t come from the same space—Jack Murdock had been perhaps two or three inches taller than Clint, and even sitting, the proportions weren’t right. 

“Guess you’d have to be,” said Matt, taking in a quick huff of stale air to see if he could scent a wad of cash; money had a very distinct metal-linen-wire-filth smell, and neither of them had more than a few bills between them. “They tell you how much this whole thing is going to cost?” The last couple, a man and a woman with two cats and nervous dispositions, had told him that they had run out of the money to continue the adoption process. They’d both been lying, but he remembered. Can you put a dollar figure on a kid, you ask? Oh yes, you can. 

“Laura,” Clint responded, with a mingling of pride and relief, “handles the finances. I think the last time Cooper wanted an advance on his allowance she charged interest and a transaction fee.” A frank and serious guy, Clint wouldn’t say much about himself, but he was happy to talk about Laura, or their other two kids, Lila and Cooper. On their first visit, when Matt was anxious to finish the interview quickly, he asked why they wanted to adopt a kid if they could have as many as they wanted. Clint said that actually they couldn’t anymore, and he had said it in a voice that was both calm and scary enough that even Matt, who was making it his business to be as difficult and disappointing as possible, had left it at that. If there was a problem, it must have been with Clint, because Matt could smell fertility the way he could sickness, and Laura was, uh, super healthy. It was gross, but it was true. 

“But you make the money?” Matthew asked, still keeping his face in Clint’s direction, and trying to keep from squinting, because it didn’t provide any further clarity to his other senses. Matt had this theory that Clint was a military pilot. He smelled like ozone, jet fuel, and metal more than once, and even though he told Matt that they lived on a farm, the farm smells only came from his shoes, not the rest of his body. If they did live on a farm, well, okay, but Matt didn’t buy that Clint was a farmer. 

Neither did Laura; it was one of the things she gave him a lot of crap about. She broke in, and asked Matthew what he thought of the neighborhood she’d chosen. He answered without really listening to her questions, thinking. They never talked about pulling the hay in, or whatever farmer guys talked about (cows?). Instead there was a lot of talk about the other two kids and the school they went to, and other boring stuff like that.

To be honest, Matt might have liked to be out on a farm in the middle of nowhere, just for a while, where he couldn’t hear the wailing sirens, grunting blows, exclamations of pain and sex… the things that constantly battered him until he was tired of consciousness. He didn’t know what it would be like without those, without the solid, familiar smells of humans, garbage, perfume, exhaust, and cooking food. Maybe it would be great—or maybe he would go nuts the first day, the silence sucking his brain out through his ears and snuffing him out in one horrible suctioning sound. “I thought you guys had this farm?” 

“We do, but we’re not there all year round.” Laura was pleased he’d asked a question; Matthew had tried not to say very much at all, except if it was rude, because he didn’t want them to get used to the idea that he wanted to please them. He wouldn’t be the broken baby bird, the stupid stray dog in the kennel. They weren’t going to get an idiot to dress up and trot out to church, they were going to get a real kid that didn’t need a replacement for his dead dad, thanks. 

“Easier to breathe out there. Higher up in the mountains, and air is cleaner higher.” That was Clint again. 

“Yeah,” Matthew said, without thinking. “If you like bugs and dirt.” He heard Laura’s hair on her shoulders and the movement of Clint’s shirt as they both looked at each other. Neither of them were impressed with his act, he could tell. He wasn’t sure if he was just transparent or if they were especially determined, but his cold, distant hostility (as counter to Jack Murdock’s hot, abrupt temper as possible) didn’t phase either of them. Laura had been a mom forever, and Clint seemed to find something about Matt’s nasty comments about living in the country and charity cases vaguely funny, like he’d heard them all before. His voice came through like he was grinning, framing the syllables through his teeth. “There’s more out there than that. But it’s just where we summer, so don’t feel like I’ll make you feed the chickens.” 

“Like I could anyway.”

Clint said, “Yeah you could.” Matthew jerked his head sideways in surprise, blinking at this calm denial. The man had folded his hands over his stomach and Matt heard the chair creaking under his weight as he leaned it back on two legs. Matthew tried to decide if he wanted to argue, but Laura interrupted again to ask him what he liked to do. The meeting went on like that for a little while, and this time Matt accepted a cookie that Laura had made. 

He heard her breathing go deep and happy after he bit into it and chewed slowly. She used real butter with real salt in it, and she hacked up chunks of walnuts with a knife instead of buying the kind that already came in bits. He tasted Crisco, the soap she used in the kitchen, and the three meals she had baked in the oven before the cookies went in. They were good, and reluctantly he told her so when she asked. He ate two. The Bartons went away.

Then they came back. 

Again. And again.

The adoption process went on so long that after a few months, Matthew cautiously let himself forget it was still happening. He began to expect Clint and Laura, and they began to expect him. He eased up on the sarcastic comments, and as if to complement him, Clint made more of his own. 

Matt met the two younger Bartons, too, first at a park, then at a diner, and finally at their house. Lila and Cooper were about as thrilled with the adoption situation as Matt: he could sense a cautious optimism in all of them, but nobody was jumping up and down with joy where anyone else could see. Lila (fruit snacks, her mom’s shampoo, boxed cake mix, pencil lead) was about Matt’s age, and Cooper (cheddar goldfish crackers, sour candy, wooden toys, unwashed fabric) was a couple years younger. He could feel both of them staring at him in open fascination at first, but it didn’t last long. Lila went out of her way to make it pretty clear they wouldn’t be _friends_ or anything right off the bat, but if they respected each other’s space, it might all work out and stuff until she grew up and moved out in like, five years. He was okay with that. Cooper was actually pretty quiet for a kid; he had a certain hummingbird stutter in his heartbeat that became a constant background rhythm in whatever room Matt ended up in, but the younger boy almost never said anything. Shy, maybe, or… maybe not. Sometimes Matt got that same staring/stillness feeling from Cooper that he got from Clint, something about the way he stopped moving when Matt did. It was weird, but it wasn’t _scary_. Maybe it was just… _Barton._

Lila and Cooper were casual around their folks in a way that Matt, seasoned orphan, recognized in kids who came from healthy families. Nobody got beat or screamed at around here, and he didn’t even smell liquor in the house on his visits. That didn’t mean the country would be different, Matt reminded himself, trying to stay skeptical. It wasn’t possible to keep secrets around Matt, not for long, and he eavesdropped in his own interest whenever he got the chance. Unfortunately, he never heard anything interesting, just stuff about Clint being “on call” and Laura talking about Cooper’s grades. Clint got a lot of messages, but not phone calls, which was incredibly frustrating. Lila and Cooper were ridiculously loyal, and he couldn’t get anything out of them about what their dad did.

By the time the adoption actually went through, everybody had become used to him—Lila complaining about Matt hogging the computer, Matt visiting for Cooper’s Little League stuff pretty much on the regular, Clint and Laura showing up to a Priory awards ceremony to see Matt get a prize for his history project—that Matt actually staying in his room for longer than a night was a weird relief. 

They all went out to this organic place Matt liked and had vegan chili and mochi ice cream to celebrate. Late that night, Matthew smelled liquor in the Barton home for the first time—but it was just Laura and Clint sharing a bottle of really cheap red when they thought everybody was asleep. Faintly acidic grapes and wet plank wood twisted up Matt’s nose as he pulled a nice soft sheet up between himself and a scratchy coverlet. Laura was crying in a happy, snotty kind of way that he could hear through the stone and the walls. Matt dropped his head back on his pillow, finding the shape of his head already pressed into it as he rolled over. He tried not to listen, embarrassed (and really, really pleased) that anybody would be crying happy, cheesy-movie tears over ending up with a kid like him.


	2. Ties

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight warning for a swear.

The Barton home in New York was not in Hell’s Kitchen, but it was close enough that Laura managed to make special arrangements so Matthew could stay in the same school, something that everyone wanted because the administration there had an integrated curriculum already. Clint and Laura were advised to keep Matthew’s life as stable as possible after the official paperwork went through, and they took that advice seriously.

So despite their home being in the wrong district, Matthew stayed in the same school, a daunting multistoried edifice put up in the fifties that boasted an ancient heating system, tile, and old-school lockers with dials that didn’t work. It squatted on a corner with a couple basketball courts crammed behind it, and though the lots were weed-choked and the neighborhood about what you would expect, everyone from the students to the janitor was used to Matthew’s cane, his books, and his aggressive pursuit of education. No teacher even had a chance to underestimate his intelligence, and after Matthew’s accident, any potential bullies had so many inexplicable, uncomfortable accidents that the place was a haven for all kinds of kids that got crap elsewhere. In Matthew’s grade there was a kid with a birthmark covering half his face, another one that wore a yamaka every day, and one girl that had a voice that was so high it hurt Matthew’s ears when she sneezed. Matthew remembered the faces of these kids, not friends, just people he knew from before the accident, and he liked having them around to color in his imagination as he tapped down the hallways. He didn’t have to guess at what they looked like. They might not be friends, but he wasn’t going to let anyone torment them while he was around. 

Once he realized that his abilities gave him access to places no adult could go (say, ductwork, for example) he decided that bullies inhibited learning. Couldn’t have that. Dad would have agreed with him, Matthew was sure. As long as nobody was seriously hurt--and as long as he wasn’t caught loosening locker doors from their hinges and permanent marker ink capsules from their barrels at two in the morning--Matthew felt justified in sticking up for the little guy. Himself among them. Laxatives slipped into milk cartons, backpack threads picked loose, and P.E. clothes that stayed damp until a potential bully decided it was easier to leave everyone else alone, whereupon the pranks would stop. 

The kids all just assumed the place was haunted. 

Matthew made school his job, knowledge his goal, and he went after a career path with the single-minded pursuit that only long echoes from Jack Murdock’s heavy New York vowels could inspire. He had the years counted out and his college choices at the ready before he hit thirteen, something he was going to do for Dad, and not something he shared with anyone. Mostly, his social services rep and the Bartons were just pleased he kept his grades up, and they left him alone if they stayed that way. 

The first year with the Bartons cycled through the weeks and spring was fading out. Laura started talking about summer with increased animation, and Clint had already taken a couple trips out to the Farm to “clean the place up.” He came back smelling of jet fuel and crisp air, and when he moved Matthew could hear a few bits of straw and the skeletons of leaves cracking in the treads of his boots. 

Opening eyes to the usual darkness filled up with sounds of morning, Matthew lay on his back without moving and let his senses reassure him. The day was going to be hot and dry again, air conditioners all over the city were already buzzing before the sun was all the way up. Cooper was still asleep, muttering incoherently to himself as he came out of some shallow dream in the room next door to Matthew’s. On the other side, Lila was changing her shoes again, something she did three times every morning, though she claimed not to care what she looked like whenever she got the chance. Laura was already up, wearing the same robe she’d worn the day before, stepping around the kitchen in socks that had holes in the heels. She had the news on, just like she did every morning, turned down low but still clear to Matthew’s ears as the announcer rattled off the disasters of the night before. He wondered when Clint had come back; must have been in the very early hours of dawn, because Matthew was a light sleeper, and the jet fuel smell was so strong that it was providing Matthew with a clearer picture of the hallway outside than he usually had, filling up the space with more distinctive air currents than normal. The slurping echoes of Cooper’s voice and the scraping whisper of Lila’s shoelaces through the eyelets certainly helped, but they didn’t carry in the air like the hard chemical burn of Clint coming back from work. 

The Farm walked past again on the soles of Clint’s boots, and then descended the stairs. It joined the sticky-whisper of Laura’s socks on the tile as Clint took a chair in the kitchen. 

“Was that you?” Laura’s voice. 

“Was what me?” Clint, sounding tired but cheerful. The toaster mechanism popped.

Matthew sat up in bed, and the resulting chorus of linen and mattress springs made him miss whatever signs there might have been that indicated Laura’s response. It must have been soundless, a gesture or a nod, because Clint replied with a neutral sound of agreement. He used it when he didn’t want to lie, but also didn’t want to carry on a conversation. It sounded like, “Mnnn.” 

“Clint.” Laura was using the warning voice. 

Clint was not a stupid man. He answered. “Yes, it was us.” 

Her answering silence was profound. Matthew swung his feet over the side of the bed, shaking off fatigue quickly as his curiosity spiked. When she finally spoke, it was amongst the clatter of cereal bowls, and he missed most of it. “—thought that they were focusing on you.”

“They are. Be honest, honey. I’m not dying. The border dispute took precedence.”

Laura’s anger made her voice tight. “There’s always something that takes precedence.”

Clint sighed. “Laura, I’m not arguing about this with you.” 

That was when Lila pounded down the stairs on her fourth pair of sneakers, and the non-argument was cut off in favor of questions about chapter tests and quizzes. Matthew sat on the edge of his bed and let his socks dangle over the edge, rubbing his face and wondering how much he was supposed to care about Clint’s problems. It felt like a betrayal, sometimes, every moment he spent wondering about Clint’s weird Air Force career or whatever it was, when he should have been thinking about Dad. Matthew’s fingers still tingled with the unending wrongness of Jack’s familiar square jaw gone stiff and cold, and he felt like he was still kneeling in that alley, waiting palms down for Jack Murdock’s chest to rise with the breath he would never take again. 

Matthew got up. They didn’t make the students wear uniforms at his school, so he got to choose his t-shirt, which he found stacked for him in the drawers so the same colors were together, light to dark, left to right, with dividers labeled in Braille. He chose a red one with black edges on the hem, Dad’s colors, and reminded himself of the stuff he should be caring about: his grades, the sensory techniques Stick taught him, the never-ending names of the people who made money off the ring, and what he was going to do when he found the guy that killed Jack Murdock. 

He skipped school that day in a cloud of two different kinds of guilt.

One hand on his backpack strap and the other with his cane loose in his fingers, he waited until the sound of Laura’s car faded into the overall grind of the city traffic, the distinctive _pink pink_ sound of axle incorrectly set and some kind of custom stereo, all of it rolling off around the corner and back toward the brownstone. He waited until even he couldn’t hear it anymore before moving. The school bell was still ringing behind him as he moved across the playground and ducked through a gap in the chainlink, heading deeper into the maze of the city. The cane was pretty distinctive, especially since he was young enough that if it looked like he was a little lost kid that should be in school he might get stopped, so he folded it up and shoved it into his backpack. It was already too close to summer to hide in a hoodie, so Matthew just put his head up and moved as confident as he could pretend to be, thinking about Battlin’ Jack heading toward the ring. Super confident. _You can’t knock me down_ kinda confident. Battlin’ Jack confident. 

Matthew headed toward the gym. Since Stick left him, Matthew had been going to Fogwell’s for his purpose. It was a good place to start, because everybody made it there eventually, and all roads spread out from that central point. He’d found a spot on the roof where he could hear every voice coming up through the building from the ducts. It was really hot up there, so he brought a lot of water bottles with him so he could stay for hours. He'd been there often enough to learn all the names and the voices, smells, and shapes of the people who went with those names. Years before, when he’d hung out at the gym after school to wait for Dad, he had learned all the names of the fighters, the people Jack Murdock had liked and respected. Now it wasn’t those people he wanted to hear from, it was the people that came in smelling like money. In an age of credit cards that existed only on cell phones, those gambling guys liked to have wads of cash in their pockets, and they trailed the stink of filthy inked linen and dry cleaner chemicals wherever they went. 

It wasn’t as exciting as it sounded. In fact, it was a lot of boring listening. _Nothing_ those guys said was interesting, it was all sports and who was worth fighting, but Matthew was sure if he waited long enough, he would hear the name of Murdock. Somebody had to know something. The more time he spent listening, the more likely he was to hear it. 

The day wore on in a cloud of chatter and grunting, echoing up from the building below him. Matthew listened to a countless bunch of guys (and two girls) try to learn the basics. Halfway through the day he went through some of the exercises Stick had taught him, sweating through the noon sun as he held the poses. He had weird thoughts when he was working out like this sometimes, stuff Dad said and stuff Stick said, or made up stories he told himself about what Mom was doing, wherever she was and whoever she was. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking, he was supposed to be _not-thinking_ , but Matthew had never been very good at that. He rose slowly into Pungu Mayurasana, listening to a conversation in the Fogwell locker room two floors below about the Mets shit pitching, and all the while he was thinking about Laura watching that news program about the Narobian border and realizing Clint could have been dead all night and she wouldn’t have known until it was time to make toast… 

He worked until his shirt was all the way wet through, and afterward he had a jello cup with his water and felt a little better about playing hooky, since he suffered for it. 

The afternoon wore on, and Matthew tried not to think about Laura showing up at school and realizing he wasn’t there. More people were in the gym now, getting out of work, stretching, battering at the bags and slamming the locker doors. They talked about their wives and their girlfriends, and everyone cheered as a woman training for her first match laid out some jerk who thought he was too good to spar with someone half his size. Traffic in the city got louder. 

Other than the oppressive heat only just now beginning to cool, he could almost imagine he was back down there, his books spread out on a card table, listening to Dad’s breathing huffing out in arrhythmic explosions from beyond the ropes, the boxer’s patent leather soles scraping against the hard canvas as he ducked and twisted, and a few feet away, the man in his corner shouting—

“Murdock.” 

Matthew twitched upright, the sandwich Laura had made him falling out of his hand and landing on the gravel of the roof in front of his knees. 

“He had an attitude just like you.”

Matthew got his shoes under him, forgetting all about the sandwich, his glasses sliding down the sweat coming off his nose. He strained, focusing his senses on the single thread of sound coming from inside the building below. He knew that voice, the breathy whine that came through the nose. It was Sweeney, one of the men Dad had met that day when he first learned about his fight with Creel. His last fight, the one he was supposed to lose.

“So get your act together,” the voice continued. It was tinny, and it lacked breath and tone. A cell phone. Sweeney was talking to someone in the gym on a cell phone. “I don’t wanna orphan no more babies. It gives me indigestion.” 

Flush red rage heated Matthew’s face. The backpack slid off his shoulder as he stood up, his whole body a few degrees hotter as he stepped out of the shade of the neighboring building and closer to the edge. He heard the call disconnect and someone stuff a cellphone in a nylon bag, the distinctive velcro-on-plastic scrape a dead giveaway. Whoever it was, they weren’t getting away. It was the first time he had heard anything from or about Roscoe Sweeney since Jack Murdock turned up dead in that alley. A lead. A line toward the future, toward making it all right again. 

Breathing hard and ignoring the glare of a sun that he couldn’t see, just feel, Matthew put everything he had into trying to track the sound of that phone moving in that bag. It was some kind of fake metal case, rasping away as the bag moved, rasp-rasp-rasp, like someone walking. Someone walking meant steps, he listened, he listened _hard,_ and there they were, at the same rhythm, creaking synthetic steps on cloth laces, tennis shoes, a stride almost as long as Clint’s making up the time between steps… they got louder, closer, as the shoes, the bag, and the phone came closer to where Matt was crouching, straining his senses, and the sharp, jaw-rattling CLANG of the gym door banging open nearly deafened Matthew. He spent the next solid three minutes in a frantic scan, trying to get his senses to cooperate, to give him less than everything and more than a ringing nothing. 

Still staggered under the impact of the noise he hadn’t been expecting, he only _just_ realized it when the dried-out tennis shoes with the right-side creak and the hoarse nylon gym bag rounded the corner three blocks away. Matthew took off at a run, forgetting his bag, his water, the sandwich, everything. He just ran, trying to catch up before the guy made it out of his range. Halfway there, someone must have seen him, because he heard a gasp somewhere up above as he raced across a low pavement under a tenement, but he didn’t stop to see what they did about it. He ran four blocks, taking alleys and fire escapes when the rooftops wouldn’t do it. A flying leap took him onto the last roof, and he skidded like a runner on second, spraying gravel, as the rasp of the man was nearly overtaken by the scream of a train coming to a stop in the underground. The garbage-and-urine smell coming up out of the subway entrance made him screw up his face. The subway made his ears hurt and his senses reel, and he hated it. He headed for the edge of the roof anyway, determination and adrenaline pushing past disgust. 

He put his foot down where the roof ended and the air began, the acute angle of the concrete and the gutter pressing into the sole of his shoe. He could land on a parked car at the back of the alley, roll off that closed dumpster, and be down the stairs only ten steps behind the guy. Matthew jumped.

Something—some _one_ —snatched him out of the air and hauled him back, a fish gasping on the hook of his shirt collar. Matthew sprawled backward on the roof, tar paper scratching down the back of his neck and into his shirt. His breath came out of him in an unwilling _swoosh._

The world shimmered in new assaults of fiery input. A heartbeat was pounding a few feet over his head. Angry breathing cut through the confusion of impact. Another train screamed away somewhere below him. Voices, cellphones ringing, a scream of laughter that could have come from anywhere. Matthew lost the creaking shoe in the wreck of sound and sensation. 

For a moment, he couldn’t grasp it. He lost it. His only lead. It was gone. 

Gone, gone in the raucous roar of everything but what he needed to hear, and he shouted himself, frustration, loss, and anger that made his eyes burn.


	3. Discoveries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matthew meets another member of his new family.

Crying always messed up Matthew’s senses. His nose was running, his throat was closed, and the anger was making it difficult for him to focus. It wasn’t possible to parse through the available sensory input unless his mind was stable and his emotions weren’t making his eyes burn and his face hot. Maybe with a few more years’ practice, Stick’s training would become closer to second nature, but right now shutting out the new senses (especially vibrations, air displacement, and temperature fluctuations caused by bodies in the air) was difficult at the best of times. 

Matthew put a palm skinned raw on the rooftop gravel behind him and sat up, staring hard into the blankness that offered him no help while he tried to get a handle on his other senses. There was someone on the roof with him, he knew that already, but the dying heat of the day made it difficult for him to detect the position and size of that person. Without a sense of smell or taste, he didn’t know the person’s sex or age. He felt really blind for the first time in a while, isolated in a floating universe of nothing. All he had was his weight on the gravel, one knee curled under him, and the sting of pain from the little scrapes down his back and hip. The old familiar panic tried to come back, but he sniffed in stale air and forced it down again. 

Another deep sniff, and he turned his head without meaning to, questing for his opponent in the open air. “Who’s there?”

Finally, a heartbeat. Just one. A solid, almost preternatural _thump _that ran blood and vibrations through veins, and oriented his world. Matthew almost couldn’t believe the length of the pause between this beat and the one that must have preceded the person’s arrival. Nobody had circulation that strong, or breathing that calm and shallow. He heard it now, heard _her_ , a very gentle rasp of the late spring air down her throat, and even if his sense of smell hadn’t quite come back yet, he opened his mouth and inhaled, and he got overtones of female, leather, and the exact same jetfuel-metal smell that hung around Clint. __

“I’m a friend of Laura’s.” She had an incredible voice, no purr, all pragmatic, but low. It was the kind of voice that Matthew suspected was naturally sensual, and she must be so used to it that her clipped, easy speech was thoughtlessly designed to counter it. His unthinking rage was starting to die down, and he forced his breathing to even out so he could pick up more. She wasn’t moving, standing absolutely still, in a wide stance that Matthew detected only with an outline of her body and the faint difference between the air an inch above her skin and the breeze eeling between the buildings on either side of her. 

“You’re a friend of Clint’s,” he said, angrily, dragging the back of his arm over his nose. None of Laura’s friends had the jetfuel smell. 

There was a short pause. Her heart beat again. She must be in incredible physical shape. He couldn’t imagine it. She didn’t even need to breathe hard, and she was so silent, it was creepy. The gravel didn’t even crunch under her weight. “Him too,” she agreed, pleasantly. 

Matthew wasn’t in the mood for pleasant. “What do you want?” 

“Laura’s pretty worried.” She sounded slightly less pleasant now. 

He refused to feel guilty. “I’m fine. Or I was, until you threw me across the roof.” 

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You were the one who just tried to jump off it.” 

“Down. I was jumping down.” Matthew felt down his back for the damage, which wasn’t as bad as it felt. Probably a few scrapes, not even as bad as the rugburn he'd had after skidding down the stairs one time. 

“Really.” She didn’t sound impressed, and he suspected the curious tone was put on for his benefit. “Long way down.” 

Matthew got his sneakers under him. The sting was starting to fade away, and now the sweaty feeling on his forehead and the anger were starting to come back. “There’s a truck parked in the alley halfway there.” His only lead had just walked away, and it was her fault. “Were you following me?” 

“Of course I was. You skipped school and I got a panicked call from your mom.” 

“She’s not my mom,” Matthew snarled. 

She was not impressed. Again. She was doing it on purpose to irritate him, he thought. “Laura, then. You knew what I meant.” Finally she moved. She crossed her arms. There was a slight creak of the suit she was wearing as it creased, some kind of fitted jacket and pants and from the way it moved he suspected it was bulletproof in places. The smell he recognized too, a sort of chemical fire retardant, and with another wet sniff he picked up metal and gun oil. Jeez. 

Matthew could just see Clint setting some kind of crazy military commando on him, like it was nothing. 

“Why were you going to jump down, anyway?” she asked, still facing him. Maybe she expected him to take off. He was still considering it, but he was starting to think maybe she’d catch him. 

“None of your business.” 

“Your—Clint and Laura pretty much made it my business.” 

Matthew jerked at his shirt angrily to get it in place and injected maximum disdain into his voice. “You’re my babysitter?” 

“You better hope not, or things are going to get miserable for both of us.” 

Matthew was uncomfortably reminded of Stick. “Then what?” 

“I’m doing Laura a favor. How did you know I knew Clint?” 

Matthew ignored that question, and started walking away across the rooftop, rubbing angrily at his skinned elbows. She shadowed him immediately, moving liquid easy in the muggy air and stepping with a cat’s silence. “Don’t feel like talking to me?” Her heart beat again. She had such strength of circulation that he actually noticed when it happened, whereas with everyone else he quickly became accustomed to their presence as a steady background rhythm, like traffic or wind. None of the weapons she carried made any sound, but the straps that held them did, a very slight creaking that moved with her curves. She also had something that sounded like a car stereo on the fritz, some kind of controlled electric current. It was part of the suit. 

This was nuts. 

Matthew stopped at the edge of the rooftop and tried to ignore her as she came up behind him. “I hope you’re headed home, mister,” she said. 

“Get lost," Matthew snapped back. He found his footing and waited for the reverberating echo of a taxi’s tires to run down the alley and get him his bearings back. 

“Not going to happen. If you run, I’m just going to chase you. You really don’t want that.” He glared in her general direction. She could probably keep up with him if he took off, too. He wanted to try it, but he suspected that he might end up on his butt again, and up until this point he had been trying to hide what he could do from the Bartons—from everyone. Now someone probably knew, and she wasn’t even impressed. “Where did you learn to free run like that?” 

“None. Of. Your. Business.” A new set of echoes and a quick breeze colored in the length and breadth of the alley for him, and he took a step forward, but she caught the back of his collar again. He almost hadn’t heard her move until it was too late. Just like Stick. The old man wheezed and rambled until all of a sudden he was a leaf in the wind and nothing but impact and bad breath. 

Matthew reacted automatically. He knew from the position of her body in relation to his that she had grabbed him with her left hand, and he followed the movement, hauling his weight to her right and twisting his shoulders to jerk his shirt against the weaker side of her hand—all thumb and not four fingers—to free himself. He snapped a kick underneath her arm. He wasn’t even sure where it would end up; he didn’t have a chance to think it through. She grabbed him, he reacted. 

Plus he really wanted to get her for tossing him across the roof. (Exaggerations allowed.) 

She kept hold of him, turning her wrist and palm so the fabric wound around tighter rather than coming loose. His kick met nothing but air; he couldn’t figure out just why, somehow she had sidestepped it and kept hold of his shirt at the same time. “That was rude.” He heard a harsh grind of gravel a split-second before the inside of her heel caught the back of his. Oh. She’d stepped in to the kick, not back, and now she was next to his hip with leverage on her side. He lost his balance and she hauled up on the shirt so that he hung for a second like a fish on a hook. She was a lot stronger than she appeared to be, and she used his momentum to keep him swinging. Her heart beat again. Once. Thud, like an insulting emphasis to the physical check. “What if I told you I know who just walked out of the east door of Fogwell’s?” 

Matthew stopped bicycling in the air, and she dropped him onto his feet. “Who?” 

She didn’t bother repositioning herself in case he kicked her again. Matthew had the distinct impression that next time she might kick him back. Her voice had a certain archness. “Uh uh. You first.” 

Matthew ground his teeth. “Okay.” 

“Who taught you to free run like that?” 

“This old man. His name was Stick. I met him at the church, after my dad died.” Matthew resisted the urge to straighten his shirt for a second time. 

The play for sympathy didn’t work. She just sounded mildly interested. “An old man named Stick.” 

Matthew felt his face heat. “I know how it sounds, but that was his name, okay?” 

A faint whisper of air illustrated her hands coming up in a defensive gesture of innocence. “Okay, okay. Where did he learn it?” 

Matthew scowled. “No, it’s my turn.” 

She smiled. He could actually hear her muscles move now, as he started to calm down and focus. She was wearing lipstick, and he knew the brand; the scent in the air strengthened as her lips creased its setting. “Sure, you’re up, slugger.” 

Matthew really hated it when people called him stuff like that. He grit his teeth again, and he thought for sure that she was enjoying this, maybe keeping him off balance on purpose. Stick used to do that, to try to distract him from his senses. It made Matthew slower when he was angry, and he couldn’t pick up things that were happening around him the way he usually could. The realization made Matthew try a little harder to stay calm. He wasn’t going to let her get to him. “Who walked out of the east door of Fogwell’s?” 

“One of the members. His name is Creel. Big guy, been out of the ring for a while, and I think he must be looking for a comeback.” 

Matthew blinked in shock. Creel? Dad’s last fight, his last win? 

“Are you really blind?” 

Matthew, still going over the revelation that Creel had been talking to Roscoe Sweeney, barely heard her in time to process the question. He swung his face in her direction, and his senses colored in her image in movement, heat, scent, and air flow. “Yeah.” 

“Come on.” 

“No, I am. I can’t see.” 

“Then what are you doing right now?” She moved, quickly again, but this time he was keeping his focus on her, and he could track her movements as he tracked everything, the way she slid through the environment around him. She was noiseless to everyone but him, something about the way she distributed her weight, and from the direction of her head, he knew she was watching his face. 

It was Matthew’s turn to smile, even if there wasn’t a lot of humor in it. “Yeah, no, it’s my turn.” 

She laughed, a really buttery sound that he wasn’t sure was real. “Go, then.” 

“How do you know it was Creel?” 

“I know what he looks like. I know what every man in that gym looks like. I know everyone who knew your dad, and everyone that knows you.” 

Matthew stared in her direction, but her voice was passive, and her heartbeat steady in its dominating rhythm. “That is seriously creepy, do you realize that?” 

She made a little gesture with her hand, a dismissive gesture, like being called “creepy” was beyond her. “You’re with Clint and Laura. They’re my family. I’m going to look you up.” 

“That goes way beyond looking me up.” 

“Maybe not,” she replied, in that arch voice again. “I didn’t know you could leap buildings and see without your eyes.” 

Matthew couldn’t resist it. “No one does.” 

“Clint suspected.” 

Taken aback, Matthew blinked. He lost track of whose turn it was to ask a question. “What do you mean? I haven’t…” 

“Skipped school to spy on gym rats before? Please. This is Clint Barton we’re talking about.” She said it like it was supposed to mean something, and Matthew just stared blankly, trying to analyze the movement of body as she strolled in near-silence toward where he stood on the edge of the roof. The first breeze of the evening, blissfully cool and full of the smell of the bay and the sea from the edge of the continent, slid past her and into his face. He smelled her lipstick, her shampoo, her body. He knew she hadn’t ever had kids, that she hadn’t worn perfume in at least a week, that she had fired a gun sometime in the last twenty-four hours. He picked up Clint’s scent on her, and several other people he didn’t know. Her breathing was a quiet counterpoint to the buzz of the wire wrapped down her forearms. 

“What do you mean?” He was pulling on the neck of his shirt to get it back down straight over his shoulders, forgetting he had decided not to only a second before. 

“Clint Barton,” she repeated. “Clint Barton.” He didn’t react, just frowned at her. “You don’t know who he is?” 

Matthew was starting to get angry again, because she was leading him like he was a little kid missing something obvious. “He’s military or something. Flies planes.” 

She laughed. “He flies planes, but he’s not military. He’s Hawkeye.” 

It took him a minute to even compute that. At first he thought maybe she was referring to some kind of airplane, but no, that wasn’t right. Hawkeye was—Hawkeye was… 

Her amusement was thick in the air. “One of the Avengers.” 

“Shut up.” 

“I’m Natasha. Nat is good. Lila and Cooper call me ‘Aunt Nat,’ but I can see you’re going to have a problem with that already, so I will also accept ‘Ms. Romanov’ or even ‘Widow,’ because I like you, even though you just tried to kick me in the gut." 

Matthew gaped. “Black Widow?” He would have had to live down a hole not to know who Natasha Romanov was, but for some reason the press just referred to Hawkeye as… as Hawkeye. Mostly it was her and Captain America that did all the talking. He had never heard Hawkeye speak on television, which was the only interaction he had with the Avengers beyond Cooper’s hero worship for Thor. Now that she identified herself, he was able to find the grim, self-possessed Widow of political press conferences within the smooth, throaty archness of the woman standing next to him. 

“That’s the one.” She paused, her voice growing quiet. “You really can’t see.” 

“No!” He almost shouted it at her, infuriated that no one had told him about this. Did people just assume he knew? Was Lila laughing about it with her stupid friends that she was always texting? Why hadn’t Laura said… 

“Sorry.” Natasha sounded like she meant it. “You just took that last building like an Olympic hurdler, and I figured you…” She cleared her throat. “Never mind. I’m supposed to get you home. Laura is a wreck. You better have a good story for why you skipped school and didn’t call.” A whip of warm air told him that she’d taken the jump over the alley without warning, and her landing a few feet away was worthy of a prima ballerina. A ballerina that smelled like guns and electricity. 

Matthew gave his shirt one last yank and hurried after her, stumbling a little in his haste after he landed. She was already crossing to the next building, not running, but not waiting for him. “You’re not going to tell them where I was?” he asked, catching up to her. 

“I guess that depends. Why were you here?” 

Matthew didn’t even hesitate. This was Black Widow. “I want to find out who shot my dad.” 

“That’s what I figured. And I guess it didn’t occur to you to ask Clint for help, because you thought he was a lowly, boring pilot, huh?” Matthew chewed on the inside of his cheek as he followed her long stride across the roof. That was exactly what he thought. She seemed to know it, and rather than forcing him to admit it, she kept going. “Before you ask, no, I don’t know who killed Jack Murdock. I would have taken care of it already if I had, and Clint would have told you. Probably.” 

Matthew didn’t even know what that meant. He didn’t have time to get angry about it either. She was still talking, taking a jump and a roll now and then, and they were almost back to Fogwell’s. Her heartbeat had sped up just a little bit, not a lot, just enough to acknowledge a very slight exertion. She wasn’t even breathing hard, like she had conversations while leaping rooftops all the time. 

What was he talking about? She did! 

“And Laura is going to tell you to try to drop it, because she doesn’t want you dead in an alleyway. She’ll be really nice about it, and I can’t blame her, but I don’t necessarily agree. You’re not going to drop it. I can tell. Especially if you’re going to creepy old Mr. Miyagi’s to try to become the karate kid. Grab your stuff.” 

Matthew realized they were back on Fogwell’s roof, and the bang of a locker rising up over the choking air conditioner oriented him in a way the cooling concrete didn’t. He hurried across the roof and retrieved his bag, hauling it across his back and digging out his stick. He waited for Natasha to comment on the stick’s reappearance, but she didn’t. Instead, she chose the back fire escape that coiled, snakelike, down the edge of the building, and he followed after the hollow echo of her elevated heels on the weather-worn metal. 

“So what are you going to tell them?” he asked her, as they descended to the alleyway and he unfolded the stick. He could feel her stare, the orientation of her body and nearness of her breathing probably contributing more to the “stare” than anything else, but he felt it. “This way I don’t have to pretend to see. It takes effort.” 

She made an interested little noise. “I’m not going to tell them anything. You’re going to.” 

This wasn’t good news. “But…” 

“Oh yeah, mister, you’re going to tell them exactly what you did all day. And you’re going to apologize. A lot. But then you’re not going to agree to drop it, and Laura will pack you off to the farm.” She held up her hand and cut off his objection. “She will, better believe it. And you know what, you might like it there, if you give it a chance. It’s gorgeous.” 

“Like I’d be able to tell.” 

“Don’t be rude,” she said, mildly. “You can tell.” They rejoined the foot traffic on one of the lesser streets, and Natasha didn’t offer an arm. Instead she walked a little slower, and they both let his stick lead their way down the sidewalk. Most people got out of Matthew’s way on the sidewalk, which was more than you could say for most New Yorkers. “Go to the farm. Relax. Drive a tractor. Steal apples. Do the stuff kids do. You let me handle Creel. If Sweeney was the end of the story, the NYPD would have had this one wrapped up years ago.” 

Matthew felt rebellious. He didn’t want this taken out of his hands, even if it was Black Widow telling him that she could do it. “It’s my responsibility.” 

“I don’t agree with that either, but I’m not going to waste my breath arguing. Curb.” 

His stick slid down it right as she said it, and he didn’t comment as he stepped down. Maybe she understood how his senses worked, maybe she got that using the stick was one less thing he had to think about, especially if he was trying to blend in. “I want to handle it by myself.” 

“Well, that’s not happening.” She talked right over him. “You’re thirteen, for one. Two, it’s dangerous. Three, you’re going to go nowhere, because you can’t go the places I can go.” 

“I can go places you can’t go.” 

She paused thoughtfully, considering this, as they waited for a cab to pull out in front of them. “Alright, I give that one to you. Maybe you can. But we’re not at that point yet. Right now we’re doing recon. We’re learning about the players.” 

“We?” he asked. 

“We,” she smiled. “You want to grab my arm until we get back to your neighborhood?” 

“We,” he repeated, marveling. He took her elbow almost without thinking, and she led them both out onto the hot tarmac. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my hardworking Ghost!Beta.


	4. Foggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a considerable amount of teenage emo rambling to himself, Matthew goes for a stroll in the woods, climbs a tree twice, and meets someone with better taste in enemies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are several instances of swearing in this chapter.  
> Many thanks to my Ghost!Beta, for patience and expertise.  
> I had to add on another chapter, this one ran long.

Matthew felt like a plant that had been dug up and planted somewhere empty and alien, somewhere that smelled like cloud-cycled water instead of exhaust. Where there had been a constant suggestion of stale water and unwashed people, there was now the earthen, hay-thick scent of cows and the oversweet dust smell of flowering pine trees. He hadn’t tasted bagged chocolate milk in weeks, and the miasma of cooking now had a purity that anticipated a meal, rather than the activity of two hundred neighbors and half as many restaurants. The Bartons’ farmhouse was built with wood that yawned and stretched as it warmed in the light of early dawn, filling Matthew’s ears with an alien creaking that was nothing like the familiar crumbling sound of New York buildings, their stacked rooms swaying gently with the almost imperceptible sea breeze. Learning the house, with its second floor and attic filled with small, scrabbling animals, was not intimidating; it was the surrounding area that yawned open in a new, strangely terrifying way. This was no city to offer cover in the perceptible lines between sunshine and shadow, and the farm was not in a neighborhood, where the camouflage of other bodies was readily available. 

Empty fields surrounded it for acres in every direction, and the shrubs and trees had little to offer to Matthew, who until this point had subsisted on the echoes from metal and concrete. There was a relatively large copse of trees close enough for Matthew to hear their conversation as the wind came down off a long (mountainous?) slope to shake their needles, and from the opposite direction he could smell a large body of water, probably a lake, judging from the curious plant-y, nearly-stale scent of it when the wind blew in the right direction. 

The wind—the wind was overwhelming. It was so strong here, with nothing to stop it but a few whispering branches, and the absence of the sour-salt of the city was only half of its alien effect. Sometimes Matthew would take two steps off the front porch and that mountain wind would come through and whip away the scents, the echoes, even the perceptible changes in temperature between house and land, leaving him well and truly without sense except the tactile sensation of his shirt on his shoulders and his feet in his shoes. He would stand there in a sudden oblivion, alone in a yawning void, until he adjusted and the world came back all at once. It scared the crap out of him whenever it happened, it really did. 

Yet he couldn’t hate the Farm. It was beautiful, as beautiful as Clint had said it would be. The air was clean, filtered through by dirt, rock and air, and while he might miss the hum of traffic, the Farm was never silent. Little field mice would chatter at each other in the shelter of their dens, circling hawks would rustle their feathers as they changed direction, and the cows would low at each other when the sun began to lower in the sky. He heard Cooper speak more often here, more ready to fill the silence with moans when the Mets lost on television or with his delight the first time he and Clint got the tractor’s engine to turn over. The chime of Lila’s cellphone was a ready constant, but she too talked more, as much with Clint as Laura, the conversations becoming increasingly technical as she took an interest in some of the renovations with which Clint distracted himself whenever they were in residence. Laura sang along with the radio and indulged her interest in photography, which Matthew associated with the whirring hum of her DSLR snapping pictures. Matthew couldn’t even be annoyed that it was something he couldn’t appreciate, because she never took pictures of people, only (so she told him) birds and other small animals that clustered around the farmhouse on all sides. She left out peanuts for the squirrels and filled the air with the diluted sweetness of hummingbird feeders in an attempt to lure them in closer, and when she wasn’t busy unpacking and fixing what Clint broke after he tried to fix it, she was watching photography instruction videos on YouTube and trying out different lenses. 

Everyone seemed to expect Matthew to entertain himself. After the blow-out that had come with his return to the Brownstone with Natasha, Laura had grounded him for a solid two weeks, and by the time that was done school was out, and Natasha had only sent him one email from an obfuscating alias (“auntie@kitchenwares.net”) that essentially translated to “no news.” Matthew half-expected that she only sent him the thing so he didn’t break curfew—or maybe she just wanted to see if he could figure out the code, which had to do with how it was rendered in Braille and printed on his machine’s standard page. Matthew sent her an email back, in the same code, asking if Creel had met up with Sweeney, but her one word response (“Obviously.”) irritated him so much that he decided to prove that he could be mature and patient, too, and didn’t write back. Too late, he realized it was the spy equivalent of “The Quiet Game” and by winning, he lost. 

Now, two weeks into summer, marooned in the middle of nowhere on a farm, and deprived of his only hobby, Matthew went after the one thing on the Farm that scared him: the surrounding area. 

If Clint or Laura were the least bit worried about their blind, adopted child wandering off into the woods without supervision, they didn’t say anything about it. After Laura cried about feeling responsible for losing him the evening Natasha brought him home, and Clint used the Disappointed Voice (almost good enough to be Jack Murdock’s, really), they must have figured the two week grounding was punishment enough for taking off without warning, because no overprotective act followed. Matthew privately agreed. Grounding schedule was so regular as to be torture. Dinner started at exactly 7 rather than 7-ish. Grace time for homework completion narrowed to hours rather than days. Bedtime was marked by all devices powering off and doors actually closing with end-of-night finality. Lila and Cooper were as irritated with Matthew as Laura, because they had to deal with half of the consequences just by living in the same house. In Matthew’s opinion, angry-mom Laura could get a new job as a Prison Warden without breaking a sweat. 

Now, standing on the edge of the porch and listening to the pollen move through the trees, Matthew was just grateful they didn’t get physical about it. Matthew had heard plenty of horror stories in the orphanage, and Stick hadn’t been particularly gentle with his corrections when Matthew messed up during his training. Clint was so mad, Matthew had expected at least a Jack-like smack upside the head, but nothing like that happened. The only thing that really changed after the episode was Clint and Laura’s occasional late-night talks about Matthew, the ones he’d used to eavesdrop on when he had first arrived. They stopped. Or mostly stopped. Once he smelled wine and heard the clink of glasses, but they didn’t talk. Matthew suspected Natasha had told them something about what he’d been able to do, but he couldn’t think exactly what they were doing to get around it. He didn’t hear tapping, typing, or scratching pens. 

It was a mystery he was still pondering as he moved carefully in the direction he had chosen for himself that day, around the low hedges and out in the direction of the lake. 

He brought his cane with him, which Stick would have said was cowardly, and Matthew thought viciously of the hypocritical old man as he moved across the wide fields that surrounded the Farmhouse. If he swiped a little more angrily at the overgrown grass, there was no one there to notice, and the mown-hay smell of broken blades rose up in his path as he put each foot down carefully. He heard the heartbeats of the Bartons going through their day, and put them behind him, the beacons he’d use to return when he was ready. 

It was after lunch, and the sun was just starting grow uncomfortably warm on his face and shoulders when he reached the cover of the trees. Their shade overtook him all at once, and the cool evergreen scent of their needles replaced that of the sun-cured grass. There were more birds here, and the burrowing creatures of the fields made a different chorus than that of the ones that scampered in branches and chewed through wood. It was harder for the breeze to steal his senses here, and the cane caught any large branches in his path before they caught hold of his pant leg. He began to move quicker, stepping not with familiarity but with growing confidence. The heartbeats behind him grew fainter in the crack of branches underfoot. He put his free hand out to brush the branches that reached out for him, his fingers coming away sticky with their sap. Idly, he wondered if he stood still enough, if it was quiet enough, if he might hear the trees growing. He even tried it, stopping in what felt like an open clearing with enough space on all sides of his body for the cool breaths of air that made it through the branches, but in the end it was too loud with the twitter of birds, clatter of squirrels’ teeth, and the hoarse wind up above the tops of the trees. 

He walked farther, not knowing how far or how long he was going to go, but he wasn’t tired yet. He could run his fingers over the hands of the watch on his left wrist, but he didn’t, choosing instead to stay in the timeless bubble of the trees and damp earth as he walked. Eventually he folded up his cane as he grew better at interpreting the air as it moved through the branches, how a branch moved in the air versus a leaf, a breeze versus a birds’ wing. These were nothing like the fat, clumsy pigeons of the city; they whirred rapidly from side to side, sometimes startling at his presence and sometimes just occupying themselves with whatever-it-was birds did. Talking to each other and eating things, he had to assume.  
One or two times he snagged a foot on something he hadn’t seen on the forest floor, but once he figured out the air currents, he could use his space and distance senses to avoid the big trees and bobbing branches. He thought those probably came from noise, some kind of echolocation, but he didn’t have an explanation for his understanding of how air moved. Even Stick hadn’t given him an explanation for that, he’d just expected Matthew to figure it out, the way he had everything else. 

Well, almost everything. He hadn’t found out what really happened to Dad, not yet, even with all these extra senses. Maybe Aunt Nat had already, and the email was waiting… but probably not. 

Matthew stopped and tipped his head up toward the sky. He could feel a shaft of sunlight cut through with only one long branch spread across his face, and he kept his eyes open, but of course there was nothing to see. He took one deep breath, taking it down to the bottom of his chest, before he crouched down—and jumped. 

The first branch was rough, and it tore at his fingers, trying to force him to give up this crazy Tarzan notion, but he grit his teeth and stuck with it, hauling himself upward and flipping heels first over, under, and then up. Getting higher was better, he had more options about the way he could go, and the next couple trees were strong and a lot like climbing up a really prickly fire escape. Picking up speed and grinning like an idiot, he found his next branch, launched off a neighboring one, and… misjudged.

Matthew crashed into the next tree headlong. Birds and pine needles exploded everywhere, and Matthew frantically scrabbled at the bark to keep from falling backward. He threw himself sideways and stretched out for a foothold, only just catching one. His relief was short-lived. It was a branch, alright, but it turned out to be a dead branch. He felt the hollow fragility of it to his spatial senses right after he made the wrong decision. It broke under his weight with a sharp CRACK, and down he fell. He managed to slow the fall with a couple more branches, maybe more of an indignity than any help, and landed flat on his back in a puff of dust. 

Okay. Obviously he was going to need more work before he became King of the Jungle. He lay there for a few minutes. “Thank you, God, for keeping me humble,” he said, dryly, before rolling over and spitting out dust and a few bits of grass. There were branches stuck into his shirt, and he started pulling them out, before he heard a voice. 

Matthew brought his head up sharply. It was a high voice, and distant for anyone but Matthew. “Help!”

Matthew forgot about the branches, and the only reason he didn’t forget about his bag, with his cane and water in it, was because it was still dangling from one strap over his shoulder. 

“Help!” the voice wailed again. It was pretty high, and coming from the direction of the lake. Matthew took off running in that direction, skipping the Tarzan thing and staying on the ground, with the exception of a few swings to get him over fallen trunks and a divot made by the last rainstorm. He followed the calls until they grew louder and clearer, and finally he slowed his run, jogging the last few steps before he broke out into another of those sun-striped clearings. 

“Hey!” the high voice said. Matthew tipped his head upward, questing, and found a pounding heartbeat. He smelled old fear, but not terror, just male sweat. It was a kid, his age, maybe a little younger. “Hey, man! Help me down!” Matthew tipped his head, frowning, trying to understand what was happening. The kid was up the tree, but he couldn’t make out his silhouette with his senses. 

Matthew moved farther into the clearing. There were no other heartbeats. He smelled standard dryer sheets, lake water, adhesive. Drops of water were pinging in the dirt under the kid’s tree. He must be wet. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt or something?” 

“Are you kidding me?” Now that there was someone there, the kid’s voice wasn’t so panicked. He now sounded embarrassed and exasperated, probably around Matthew’s age. His voice was just starting to crack at the edges. 

Matthew didn’t smell blood. “No. Are you stuck?”

Another rain of drops. “Well, yeah,” the kid snapped, struggling against what Matthew only just realized was duct tape. “They taped me to the tree!” 

Matthew stood there in disbelief for several seconds. “…Who did?”

“Marty Freeman and his bunch of assholes.” Matthew’s expression must have made his confusion clear. “Hey,” the kid said, obviously getting a good look at him for the first time. “You don’t have a uniform. Aren’t you from Cootie?”

Matthew wasn’t sure he’d heard that right. “What?”

“Camp,” the boy said, clearly willing to carry on a conversation while still strapped to the tree. 

“What camp?”

“The Scouts camp. By the lake?”

“Oh. You’re from a camp?” Matthew moved up to the tree and took its measure as the wind wrapped around it. It was a pretty tough old thing, wide and long. Now that the kid mentioned it, he could smell other male kids: the same dryer sheets, bubble gum and cheap spaghetti sauce. They were long gone, and not anywhere close; he and the other kid were downwind, too. 

“Yeah. Camp Coot, we just call it Cootie. It’s over that way.” 

Obviously, the kid hadn’t caught on yet, because he jerked his chin in the direction of the lake. Matthew decided not to point out he couldn’t see the movement. “Camp Coot?”

“It’s a bird, man. Like a big black duck. They’re all over the lake.”

“I haven’t been there yet,” Matthew said, honestly, making more of a show of climbing than was strictly necessary, and placing his feet before hoisting himself up to the next branch.

“You’re pretty good at that,” the kid said, generously. 

“Not as good as you might think,” Matthew muttered, swinging gently to the next branch and straddling it so he could take a minute to breathe. “Why’d they tape you to the tree?” he asked, trying to sound casual about it as he leaned forward into the cool shadows of the branches to see what he was able to discern from the pattern of sound moving across the tacky surface of the tape over the softer cross-hatch of the boy’s uniform.

“Why do they do anything?” the boy replied, defensively. “They’re assholes.”

Matthew made a neutral sound, because it was true, a lot of kids could be assholes. From what he could tell, the boy was more round than he was square, and with his voice at that pitch and the crack in it, he imagined that Marty Freeman and his bunch of assholes had plenty of material to torment this kid with. “Uh… so where’s the end? I don’t have a knife.”

“I do,” the kid said brightly.

Matthew paused mid-reach. “You do?”

“Yeah! It’s in my pocket! Oh. Wait… it’s in my pocket.”

“Under the tape,” Matthew suggested, dryly. 

“I guess,” the kid said, disappointed. 

Matthew resumed his reach, and ran the tips of his fingers over the kid’s stomach, trying not to be weird about it. 

“You can’t see it?” the kid said, stretching the tape as he tried to crane his neck and see down.

“I’m blind,” Matthew said, trying very hard not to snap.

“You don’t need to be like that,” the kid said, obviously assuming he was being facetious. 

“I mean I’m really blind. I can’t see it.” Matthew worked his fingers around and finally found the edge of the tape, which had curled up when somebody yanked it free. 

There was a heavy pause. Matthew could feel the kid trying to squint into his face, and deliberately moved into shadow again before he started talking again. “What, really? Are you— Hey, that tickles.” Matthew was digging under the kid’s armpit to try to pull the tape free. The kid started to giggle like a cartoon clown, flailing against the tape. 

“Knock it off!” Matthew said, annoyed. “You’re making it weird.”

“It tickles! It’s not weird!”

“I’m trying, stop squirming around,” Matthew sighed, and then, finally, he got a grip on the end of the tape and ripped the first strip clear without thinking. 

“OW!” 

“Oops,” Matthew said, apologetically. “Sorry.” 

The kid said a word a lot worse than “asshole,” but Matthew put up with it. These were extreme circumstances. He had to move branches a couple times to get the tape off the kid. This Marty Freeman guy had done a serious job of it, wrapping the tape around the kid and the branch a whole bunch of times. “This is really messed up,” Matthew said, as he switched branches for the last time and got another splinter trying to rip the duct tape from the tree bark on this side.

“Tell me about it.” 

“Can you get out, maybe like wriggle around? Or just give up the jacket.”

“Aw man, my mom’s gonna kill me.” But the kid wriggled and twisted, and made it out of the sleeve of his jacket, which had been wound around with tape a few more times and secured to a neighboring branch. “Got it.” The kid heaved a sigh, and sat long ways on his branch for a second before Matthew heard him start to climb down, questing with the toe of his shoe and then inching like a sloth. Matthew dropped down behind him a few seconds later.

“Thanks,” the kid said, with feeling. “I thought I was going to be up there when it got dark, and there are bears out here, you know, and I could tell it was getting dark so I just _freaked_ and started yelling my head off.” 

“I get it,” Matthew said. It was getting dark; Matthew could feel the air temperature as it dropped, and he reflected that it was probably a really long way back to the Farm. Clint was going to be _ticked_. 

“I’m Foggy,” the kid said.

Matthew tipped his head. “What, that’s your name?”

“Yeah, that’s my name. Well, my real name is Franklin, but who wants to be called Franklin?” 

Matthew privately thought that “Franklin” would probably go over better than “Foggy” with people like Marty Freeman, but out loud he said, “I’m Matt.” That’s all, too. Not Matthew, not his last name, not the stuff he told people at the orphanage or even the Bartons themselves. Just “Matt.” 

Oblivious, Foggy slapped him on the shoulder, a gesture that took Matthew, lost in thought, by surprise. He staggered. “Oh sh—“ Foggy said, immediately contrite. “Sorry, man, I forgot you couldn’t see that coming.” 

Matthew recovered and straightened up. “Yeah, no big deal.” 

There was another pause, and Matthew turned his head to narrow his eyes at Foggy. “You’re staring at me, aren’t you?”

There was an embarrassed cough. “Don’t you have a cane and glasses? I mean, aren’t those things blind people like to have?” 

Matthew sighed. “I don’t know if ‘like’ is the right word. But yeah. Only I didn’t bring my glasses into the woods, because I didn’t think there’d be people taped to trees that would get wigged out when I didn’t have them.”

A slight whip of air as Foggy shrugged more apologies, then said out loud (after another, oh-he-didn’t-see-that pause), “Sorry.” 

Matthew decided not to explain about the cane. “It’s getting dark. I gotta get home, or my—or I’ll get in trouble.” 

“Oh, yeah. Did you walk here or something? I didn’t know people lived out here.”

“Yeah, we’ve got a farm out that way,” threading his arm through the free strap of his backpack, Matthew gestured vaguely in the right direction. 

“Oh. Well, hey. D’you… you need help getting home, or something?”

Matthew had to smile. “You were just taped to a tree, and you think I need help?”

“Okay, okay, calm down. I was just asking.” 

Matthew opened his mouth to reply, but a distant sound interrupted him. It was a strange sound, a city sound, a roaring sound that was getting closer. It was a foreign, technological sound, and he didn’t have time to do more than step back in Foggy’s direction and open his mouth in warning before it was on them, zipping once over their heads with the speed of a bullet and the burnt-oxygen smell of a jet engine. 

“Holy shit,” Foggy said. 

The engine sound banked over the trees ten yards away, and then came to hover over their heads, in the center of the clearing. Matthew’s senses pinged off intense heat, resistant metal, and an electric buzz like a hive of bees. Then he got a solid whiff of expensive cologne. And vodka.

“Holy shit,” Foggy said again. “It’s Iron Man.”


	5. Iron Man Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short half-chapter filled with tin snark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Shan for her support and my loyal ghost!beta for her efforts.

“Always nice to be appreciated,” the man in the metal suit said. He dropped a little lower, until he was just short of singeing the very tips of the grass a few yards away, and then he cut thrust, dropping the intervening two feet to land with practiced balance in the center of the clearing. There was a foreign clank as the faceplate moved up, and Matthew got a fresh whiff of that cologne (had to be Prada), and a puff of slightly warmer air escaping the suit provided a fleeting map of the billionaire’s smiling face.

Despite himself, Matthew was impressed with the precision required to handle such a complicated device; the news made it sound like it was just a glorified set of battle armor that zoomed around, but with it in front of him and in full “view” of his senses, Matthew could tell it was more than that. The suit was alive with electric signals, pinging and buzzing with internal movement and setting the air around it alight with curiously contained energy. Matthew could hear Tony Stark breathing inside it, and he could hear the suit circulating oxygen with the same tuned efficiency with which it adjusted to the man’s smallest movement. How did Stark manage to command the suit to lift the faceplate while using all his limbs to land? Had to be a lot of little signals you had to learn, and Matthew hoped that the little finger twitch to raise the faceplate was really different than whatever little finger twitch set off the missiles. 

The suit smelled of a veritable banquet of weaponry, none of which Matthew had smelled before and identified only by the occasional tinge of familiar flammable chemicals. Molecular content that rubbed elbows with the materials used in demolition explosives floated through the air toward Matthew’s nose. It was as if a heartbeat surrounded by a spiderweb of electric circuitry happened to also contain half an atomic bomb in a candy-coated titanium shell. In comparison to the complexity of the suit, the man inside the shell was an open book: fifties, bad heart, excellent physical shape, hard drinker, owns more than six different cars, recently spent time with a woman who favored _Miss Dior Cherie._

“Which one of you is Matt?” he asked. He sounded pretty jolly about it. 

Beside him, Foggy began to breathe very fast, and all of his adhesive-scented embarrassment had transformed into nervous excitement. Matthew could detect the other boy’s hand lifting to very slowly point at the back of Matthew’s head. Annoyed without knowing exactly why, Matthew stepped forward. “I’m Matthew. Clint sent you?” he asked, refusing to be starstruck by the coolest guy to ever crash a race car. 

“Good guess, but no.” Iron Man straightened up out of the bent pose he’d used on landing, and Matthew suspected half of it was just that—pose. “Natasha did. Knew right where to find you, too.” He was really grinning, now. Matthew could hear it in his voice, a structure of the syllables. “I’m really curious why she thought it was necessary to bug a twelve-year-old. What kind of trouble do you get into, kid?” 

Matthew’s mouth opened and closed twice before he spoke. “She bugged me?”

“Yeah. Tracker, pretty standard issue. You probably don’t even want to know where it is. For all we know, she put it in your Cheerios.” 

Matthew was about to angrily protest that he couldn’t be _bugged_ , he would _hear_ it, when Foggy finally found his voice. “You know _Iron Man_?” he whispered loudly into the side of Matthew’s face. 

Matthew turned his head a little in Foggy’s direction, hoping Foggy could see his expression of carefully-constructed disinterest. “No. My… folks do, though.” 

“ _Dude._ ” Matthew heard the creak as Foggy’s jaw fell open again.

Matthew turned back to Stark. “I’m fine. I was going to come back.”

“Hey, you want to run around out here with Yogi Bear, I’m good with it. My experience with the Babysitter’s Club ended when I slept with my last nanny.” Scowling, Matthew imagined Foggy’s eyes bugging out. “Oops,” Stark said. “Did that just earn me a PG-13 rating?”

“I would guess so, sir,” said a polite female voice. “Perhaps you could edit your dialogue in front of minors?” Matthew twitched with surprise. He could usually discern the difference between a computerized voice and a live one, but this one was nearly flawless. Even the intonations were right, and if it hadn’t been for the tiny, _tiny_ echo in the way the Irish woman said that one syllable, he would have thought someone was coming through Stark’s radio, and not the computer in the suit. 

Stark’s voice sobered. “But they want you back now, so it was, ‘You’re the fastest, Tony, go get the kid.’”

Distracted from his annoyance, Matthew’s mouth relaxed and his brow creased. “What happened?”

“Nothing. It’s just dinnertime. Let’s go.” 

Matthew heard Stark’s bad heart give an extra little flutter, and he frowned even deeper. “You’re lying. What’s wrong?”

Stark, obviously out of practice asking people to do things nicely, moved in their direction. 

Matthew held his ground. Foggy’s excited mouth-breathing made it increasingly difficult to focus on Stark’s heartbeat, already complicated by whatever condition he had and the hive of circuitry under the man’s sternum.

“Nothing,” Stark said, lightly. “Quit giving me a hard time. I have it on high authority that like half the world would be thrilled for a flight with Iron Man Air.” 

Another lie, only slightly offset by the strong second truth about Iron Man Air, all BS, but true enough at the same time. Matthew renewed his grip on his backpack strap and leaned in, tensing. Whatever was wrong had Stark lying about it, but the man wasn’t sweating, frightened, or nervous. Maybe a little uncomfortable, the way he kept shifting his weight from the heel of his foot to the ball, but that was probably just because he didn’t know anybody under eighteen. _Probably tries real hard not to know anybody under eighteen,_ Matthew thought contemptuously. Whatever was wrong, it was important, but nobody was dead.

He turned to Foggy. “Hey, man. I think… I think I gotta go.” 

“Sure!” Foggy said, in a too-hearty voice. “Uh. Sure. Totally. Hero business! Ha ha. I mean. Wow. Nobody is going to believe me. This is so cool. Can I tell them you got me out of the tree?” he asked Stark.

As Matthew’s scowl deepened, he heard a metallic hiss as Iron Man leaned back to stare up into the tree. The scout jacket was still swinging in the wind up there, firmly wrapped up in duct tape. “Uh,” he said, sounding nonplussed. “Better not, kid. I’m supposed to be incognito out here. Sorry. I’ll make it up to you. Send you one of those Official Fan Club grab bags, okay?” 

Matthew heard Foggy’s heart skip a beat with pure adrenaline. His voice went up an octave. “Incognito! Of course. Lips are _sealed_ , man, Mr. Stark, Mr. Iron Man. Sir.” Foggy actually saluted. “I won’t tell _anyone_. You can count on me.” 

Matthew rolled his eyes and hoisted his backpack farther up on his shoulder, wishing he could shove past a titanium suit that probably weighed ten times what he did. “Can we go?” he demanded.

Iron Man saluted Foggy back. “Later, kid.”

“Foggy.”

Pause. “Huh?”

“Oh, that’s my name, Mr. Man—Mr. Stark. Foggy. Foggy Nelson.”

“…Right. Later, Foggy Nelson. Don’t forget what I said about the incognito thing.” 

“I won’t! I—Hey, Matt.” Matthew had started to stalk away in the direction of the Farm, already pulling angrily at his backpack zipper for his cane so he didn’t have to feel around in the trees while he was worried and mad. Foggy grabbed his elbow, and Matthew couldn’t stop the flinch of surprise. He hated it when people grabbed him out of nowhere, especially after Stick spent forever trying to get him to react automatically when unknown hands and fists flailed out of the air at him. Controlling the reaction, Matthew stopped and turned his head slightly in Foggy’s direction, realizing that his eyes weren’t going the right way and probably looking freaky without his glasses, but he didn’t want to care. “Thanks,” Foggy said, his voice now a normal pitch but closer and more earnest as the other boy leaned in. “Thanks for getting me out of the tree, and stuff.”

Some of Matthew’s annoyance melted away. “Yeah,” he said. “No big deal.” 

Foggy let his elbow go, and Matthew heard him head back in the direction of the lake as Iron Man clanked by in his riot of buzzing and hissing metal. “So!” Stark said, cheerfully. “Dinner?” 

“You’re not taking me back for dinner,” Matthew said, snapping the cane segments into a straight line as he pushed through the underbrush. 

“What am I taking you back for, then?” Stark seemed a little uncertain in the face of such open antagonism. Matthew didn’t know if it was because he was a kid or because he was blind, but either way he wasn’t going to fall over himself in admiration. Foggy had covered that. 

“Whatever happened. Is it Clint? He left early again this morning and met you guys in the jet out on the slope.”

“How did you know that?” Stark asked, curiously, keeping up in a chorus of hissing pistons and buzzing electricity as Matthew moved back toward the Farm, cane first. 

“Because where else would he be going at four in the morning?” 

“How did you know the jet was on the slope?”

“Where else would it be?” Matthew demanded, narrowly avoiding a half-grown sapling that tried to trip him. 

Stark had no immediate answer for that. He did not offer to fly them again, and he didn’t try to grab Matthew and fly off, either, which was pretty much the only point in his favor as far as Matthew was concerned. …Other than just _being_ Iron Man, anyway.

“So is it Clint?” Matthew repeated, temper rising. “Is he hurt? What happened?”  
Stark didn’t answer for a few steps. His heart really was crappy—Matthew could hear it straining—but he moved with stamina under all that metal weight. He must work out a lot. Good for him. “It’s complicated,” he said, finally. “I’ll let him explain.” 

“Great,” Matthew said. “Thanks for nothing.”

Stark laughed, surprising him. “Oh, kid. In the Olympics of angry teenager attitude, I got the gold medal ten years in a row. You’re just an amateur.” 

Matthew wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He would walk faster, but he was already going as fast as he could go, and he didn’t want to admit that having the metal suit drag him through empty air would be more sensory deprivation than he was equipped to handle at the moment. 

“In particular,” Stark continued, “you’re going to want to work on the chip on your shoulder and give it a little bit of a bleeding edge. And try a little humor. It makes people want to talk to you more, and then you can make them feel bad for trying.” Matthew grit his teeth. “Maybe you want to improve your self-righteous air, too,” Stark continued. "If you’re going to compete, you gotta put your all into it. None of this worrying about other people and helping fat kids out of trees.” 

Matthew whirled so quickly that Stark almost stepped on him. This time Matthew did try a shove, bringing his cane up a little bit so it went loose and wasn’t crossed between them before he put a palm out. Trying to push the metal suit was like trying to deadlift a truck. Matthew felt segments shifting and a curious lack of cold, proving that the suit was not, actually, iron, but some alloy with far more flexibility. He pushed at it. 

Nothing happened. 

Matthew shoved again anyway. “Listen, I don’t need a shrink. I don’t care what you think about me. You’re just used to everybody worshipping you. You better get over it, because I’m not impressed. I don’t care who Clint and Laura’s friends are. You’re nobody to me.” 

Matthew felt his face heat up with suppressed anger as Stark laughed again, the sound echoing up out of his makeshift tin can. “You didn’t like it when I called him fat,” he said, fondly, like Matthew was a pet dog who had just done an amusing trick. 

Matthew spun back around, nearly tipping as he overcommitted and then plunged forward into the wood again. He could just bet that Stark was still grinning, and it burned him up, so he tried not to think about it. Instead he cast his senses ahead, pushing faster and farther so he could ignore the man behind him.


	6. Colleagues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matthew Meets the Avengers; or: Team Failure at Family Counseling

Matthew knew there was something wrong before they left the woods. Dead leaves were still crunching under the soles of his sneakers and the slightly cool shadows had not yet given way to the blank, open-space warmth of the fields surrounding the farmhouse, but he could already hear voices, too many at first to differentiate among them. Several heartbeats pounded a chorus within the boundaries of the now-familiar creak of old wood. Trying hard not to panic, he increased his pace, ignoring Stark's surprised grunt and the arrhythmic whir of his machine as the older man did a quickstep to catch up.

"All this empty space," Stark was muttering to himself between heavy thuds of armored footsteps, "it's not natural. Clint and his damn sightlines." Matthew heard the echo of a metallic sigh. "I've been in New York too long." Then, as they came up to the front porch and Matthew darted up the steps, away from the paralyzing wind, the man said, "The whole team is here. Don't freak out, okay? Kid. Hey—"

But Matthew was already putting a hand out for the screaming creak of the screen door, pushing against the old springs, and taking in the new scents and sounds of the farmhouse. Reaching for training he hadn't needed for a while, he separated new scents from old, person from person, and voice from voice.

The first thing to break through the chaos was Laura, because her voice was tight with anger and she smelled of fear. He heard the slightly-increased sound of heart and voiced breath behind a closed upstairs door, the Barton children eavesdropping just out of sight at the top of the stairs. Stark had said the whole team was here, and as Matthew sensed the outlines of people turning to face him, heat signatures and air displacement, he turned his head from one side to another, trying to find Clint Barton in the mess. No scent nor sound of him.

The biggest man in the room was also the warmest, and were it not for the situation and the distinctive gunpowder and cotton smell of a soldier, Matthew would have said Steve Rogers was running a fever. Instead he just figured Captain America always ran hot, probably all that running, leaping and hero-ing. He started to speak, maybe to introduce himself, but Matthew wasn't in the mood for more Avengers ego, and he swerved around him as soon as his cane met the side of a boot. They had come fresh from some kind of battle, because when the captain reached out into the air where Matthew had been, there was a solid whiff of scorched cloth and a desert dust foreign to Matthew's senses. 

Natasha was there, calm despite her unnaturally slow heartbeat, standing behind Laura, which was somehow a good sign. Breathing quickly and feeling an illusion of clammy stiffness, his father's dead flesh under his fingers, Matthew curled two fists around his cane in front of him and came to an abrupt stop in the center of the room. He heard the captain rotate around to face him and Stark clomping up the steps behind him, but for some reason he addressed Natasha, not bothering to keep his voice down. "What happened? Where is he?" 

"The boy is fast," said a deep voice from another corner of the room. Here too was a large man, one that smelled like a thunderstorm, and Matthew didn't even bother to look back at Thor, god of thunder.

"Lying down upstairs," Natasha said, sounding as calm as ever. Matthew heard Laura sniff deeply in an attempt to control her emotions, and he turned his senses upstairs, listening for a heartbeat above his head he hadn't noticed before. It took a moment to work his way through the others', but when he did it, he found Clint, circulation slow and breathing a considerable pause apart. Sleeping.

All of those present must have seen him turn his ear toward the ceiling and grow still. "Is he listening?" the captain asked, awkward into the silence.

"Yes," Natasha said, with a hint of amusement.

"He's kind of a brat," Stark announced, from where he now stood in the open entrance to the living room. He sounded proud. "I like him." 

"Shut up, Tony," Steve said, on a sigh.

Thor chuckled. 

"Matt," Laura said, in a soothing motherly voice she used on purpose when she thought he was upset. "Clint is... sick. His... _colleagues_ brought him back." Matthew noticed she didn't use the word "friends" and everyone in the room seemed stung by that, even Natasha, who took her hand off Laura's shoulder and crossed her arms in a distinctive set of leather creaks.

"He's not sick," Matthew said, not to be disarmed by Laura's obvious distress. "He was fine yesterday." 

"Actually he wasn't," Natasha said, in a neutral voice that had no emotion attached to the words.

"He was!" Matthew insisted. "I can tell when people are sick." 

"How?" the captain asked, with alert interest.

Matthew turned to face his approximate direction and scowled. He didn't know exactly how high to look, and without his glasses he thought his expression would never be as impressive as a sighted person's. Glaring at someone worked better if you could do it into their eyes. "It doesn't matter. I can." 

"Well, he was," Natasha resumed, as if there had been no interruption. Everyone seemed to respect her familiarity with the family, and there was a very short pause. Matthew didn't interrupt this time, except to turn in her direction once more. "Clint was severely injured a couple years ago, and we tried a relatively new procedure being developed by a friend of ours, a specialist. It replaced the damage with a replication of flesh. It's the same procedure that was eventually used to produce the body for the Vision. Do you know who that is?" 

Matthew hesitated. "He fought with you in Sokovia. I don't know what he looks like." 

"He's really red," Stark chimed in from the doorway. "Like scarlet-red skin. All synthetic." 

"Clint has red skin?" Matthew asked, confused.

"No," Natasha said, shaking her head. "That was just the appearance Vision has." Aside to the rest, she added, "Do we even know if that was Ultron's thing or Vision's thing?" 

"He was that color before we uploaded JARVIS," Stark volunteered.

"It may have been a result of the infinity stone's influence," Thor argued. 

"Does it matter?" the captain asked.

"Excuse me," Matthew said, in his most cutting voice. "Can I find out what happened to Clint, please, before you guys put together a stupid lecture about somebody I don't even know? I don't care about the color of his skin, okay?" 

A short pause.

"See?" Stark said, cheerfully, to the captain. 

The captain sighed again. 

"Anyway," Natasha said, shifting her weight from one boot to another, "the synthetic flesh saved his life at the time, but it's been causing problems ever since. We found out around the time he met you that it's been replicating whenever it reaches slight injury or distress, sometimes interfering with the way the body works naturally. Clint used to be partially deaf, in fact. Almost eighty percent. He figured out something was off when he started to hear more, and all of us really noticed after he took a bullet a few months ago and got up again."

Laura made a choked sound.

Natasha touched her shoulder again. "Sorry, Laura. I forget." 

Laura made a frantic little wave in the air. "Why should you apologize to me? Just say it. We all need to know, now."

"We are at that point," the captain said, grimly. 

Matthew turned his head sharply. "Why? If it's been great so far, what's wrong now?"

No one answered. Automatically Matthew turned toward Natasha, but she didn't say anything, and he didn't know if that was because she wouldn't or because she couldn't. 

Finally, it was Stark that spoke. All the cheer was gone from his voice. "Because if his brain starts to synthesize, he's not going to be Clint anymore."

Matthew tried not to show how much this scared him. "What do you mean?"

"We don't have a recorded case of this happening, Matt. We aren't entirely sure. But human brains aren't made to be formed this way. If he's made over as cells die, thoughts may not process the same way. Like... brain injury."

"Brain injury," Matthew repeated, taking an unintentional step backward. He felt Laura break away from Natasha and wrap her arm around his shoulders. He didn't move away from the touch. No sounds of surprise or distress from the top of the stairs; Laura must have already explained to her children while he was gone. 

There was an ugly pause, interrupted only when the house's entire foundations creaked under the weight of the Viking stepping out of the corner. "All hope is not lost," he said, in a rolling baritone of firm confidence. "We have great confidence in the admirable fortitude of our friend Barton. Also, our learned friend Doctor Banner has been working on a cure most diligently."

"Is he close?" Laura demanded, from over Matthew's head.

"He's doing everything he can," Stark said, his tone now shifting to one of guarded defensiveness. 

"When you all aren't flying to other countries on missions," Laura snapped back, a disruption in the air some sort of gesture, maybe toward the television. 

"Laura, the Avengers aren't one person, or even a group of people. If there are worldwide threats, we have to respond," Captain America said, gently. 

"Can you try not to sound like a damned politician, Steve?" Laura said, her voice rising again. "Don't talk to me like I don't know you." 

Matthew couldn't see or hear any response to Laura's anger from the Avengers. Stark didn't quip, Natasha didn't argue and the captain made no attempt to defend himself. They all seemed to sense that unless they told her it was all going to be okay right now, nothing was going to help. Matthew felt that way, too. He felt Laura shake as she leaned into him, and her grip grew tighter around his shoulders. 

Laura drew in a shaky breath. He could tell she was just holding it together for a while longer, to get the questions out of the way, so she didn't fall apart in front of them (or him). "What happens until he—and a whole _team_ of biomedical experts, _I assume_ comes up with a cure?" 

Nobody was stupid enough to confront Laura's emphasis on the attention being paid to her husband's problem. 

"I'm afraid until then, we wait." The captain sounded regretful, but not apologetic. Matthew thought that Laura was probably right, he'd given this kind of bad news to people before, and he was trying to be nice without making promises. For some reason, Matthew suddenly liked Tony Stark a little more than he had five minutes ago. Maybe Iron Man was an egotistical jerk, but he didn't have so much practice leading people into battle. Maybe it was unreasonable to blame Captain America for what happened to Clint, but Matthew had to blame somebody, and like Laura, he settled on the man who seemed most capable of dealing with it. Unlike her, however, he kept his anger to himself. He had lots of practice.

"We should let him get some rest," the captain continued. His voice changed as he turned his head in Stark's direction. "And we can be there to meet the other team coming in from Seoul." Quietly, he added, "Tony has _six_ teams working on this. We will absolutely be in touch if there are any developments." He turned toward the door.

"There's a few things I need to do, Laura. I'll be back tomorrow morning, okay?" Matthew heard Natasha flow silently past him in a faint cloud of leather and female scents.

Stark waved once at Matthew in farewell, then turned to follow. He'd already put down the mask, though, and Matthew couldn't tell if the man forgot he couldn't see a wave, or if he could tell Matthew could sense the movement in the air anyway. Either way, he didn't wait for a reply, but clanked out the door and onto the porch.

Thor apparently didn't know the meaning of subtle exits or tactful conversation, and Laura had to let Matthew go so that the massive man could enfold her in a huge hug that lifted her toes off the carpet. "Be well, wife of Hawkeye," Thor rumbled, earnestly. "Fear not, for we will find a cure for what ails him so he may fall honorably in some future battle!" Natasha, waiting behind him, punched him on the shoulder. "With time," he added.

Thor put Laura down (she mumbled a breathless, awkward thank you) and strode out the door.

Natasha gave Laura a final hug, which she returned, and then patted Matthew on the shoulder once. "The Avengers will figure it out, Matthew. When you go to bed, try to forget about it. Just go back to whatever you were doing when Tony found you, and leave it up to us, okay?" 

Matthew turned his face up toward hers, brow furrowing behind his glasses. What he was doing when Tony found him? He'd been out in the woods. She knew that. She had to know that he wasn't going to forget about this, that he didn't want to leave it up to them. 

Matthew opened his mouth to retort… but then didn’t. "Okay."

She squeezed his shoulder, and then she too was gone.

The room seemed strangely ordinary with the heroes gone from it. Behind him, Laura turned toward the kitchen and called for Lila and Cooper to come down and help with dinner. Matthew stood still, thinking about what Natasha had said, not really hearing footsteps on the stairs, but her voice in his head. _When you go to bed._ _Whatever you were doing when Tony found you._

It sounded like an appointment to him.


End file.
